Presented by Marianna Grynchuk. Pilgirm Church. 12 Mar 2016
In her programme notes, Marianna Grynchuk observes that the “[piano] sonata is truly ageless and limitless. It remains one of the principal means of taking the listener on an exhilarating, captivating and thought provoking journey”, and course she is right. The programming for her recital, The Sonata: Reflections of Life, was indeed a journey that traversed two-hundred-and-ten years of compositional styles, commencing with Mozart and finishing with Nigel Westlake. We heard forms ranging from strict classical, through romanticism to contemporary free-form.
Grynchuk is an exceptionally talented young pianist who has performed extensively and won multiple awards. Her technique is superb and she is at her best when exploring lyricism. Grynchuk brought out the playfulness of Mozart’s Sonata in B flat K333 and excelled with the lyricism of the andante cantabile second movement but perhaps did not bring out fully the tension that exists in the occasional dissonance.
For her second piece, Grynchuk chose Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23 in F minor, the so called Appassionata. Czerny once famously said that “…Beethoven’s compositions must be played differently from anyone else's. It is not easy to express this difference in words." I believe this to be true, and all dozen or so recordings by different pianists of the Beethoven sonatas that I own are all fundamentally different in their approach.
Grynchuk’s approach to the Appassionata is also different, and I suspect will be different the next time she performs it. Beethoven’s piano music is like that – it is open to so much interpretation. Next time she might alter the dynamic balance between the left and right hands, so that the upper octaves of the piano are not overwhelmed by the lowest notes of the instrument, something that Beethoven was so keen to explore and often at great volume! This was especially evident in the andante second and allegro third movements, and also had the effect of occasionally dislocating the synchronization between left and right hands.
One of Grynchuk’s teachers, the celebrated Eleanora Silvan, is on the ‘Liszt list’, meaning that Liszt taught the teacher of her teacher’s teacher! Some of this heritage came out during Grynchuk’s performance of Liszt’s mighty Sonata in B minor. It’s a brute to play, demands strong technique and takes no hostages. It is emotionally charged and needs to be played with deep understanding. Grynchuk did that and her performance was a highlight of the concert. As the final transcendent note faded away, it took the audience a full ten seconds to return from where they had been transported to offer up enthusiastic and well-deserved applause.
Nigel Westlake’s Piano Sonata No. 1 is in an altogether different style, and its inclusion in the program rounded out the journey from classicism to modernism. It lacks the tonal structures of ‘conventional’ sonatas and in many senses might be considered to be three stand-alone pieces that independently explore a myriad of atonal, minimalist and improvisatory musical ideas. It is the sort of composition that is best appreciated through live performance – it’s exciting to watch – and Grynchuk was worth watching.
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Pilgrim Church
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival. Presented by Musica Viva. Adelaide Town Hall. 11 Mar 2016
Voyage to the Moon is a happy collaboration between Musica Viva and the Victorian Opera. It is the most recent addition to the genre of ‘pasticcio’ opera in which selected arias and musical numbers from pre-existing operas are joined together to create an altogether different narrative. The so called ‘juke box’ musical (such as Mama Mia) is in some ways a modern version of pasticcio, which has been around since the mid eighteenth century.
Voyage to the Moon is the brain child of the celebrated Michael Gow (writer and director), Phoebe Briggs (musical director), and the late and great Alan Curtis (musical arrangement) who sadly passed away during the development phase of the opera and was succeeded by Calvin Bowman. The result is a thoroughly entertaining chamber opera that has been warmly received around the country. This performance is featured as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts and played to a near capacity audience in the iconic and stately Adelaide Town Hall.
In short the story is a fantasy about unrequited love. Orlando (sung by Emma Matthews) is rejected by his sweetheart and is driven insane. His friend Astolfo (Sally-Anne Russell) tries to comfort him, and Magus (Jeremy Kleeman), a wise magician, also intervenes and takes Astolfo on a journey to the moon – the home of lost things – to find Orlando’s missing reason. Before Astolfo can complete his mission he needs to convince the fierce Guardian of the Moon, Selena (also sung by Matthews), that Orlando is worth saving. Astolfo offers to sacrifice himself to save Orlando but is spared by Selena. On returning to Earth, Orlando, who is still enraged, seeks to fight Astolfo but the magus intervenes and returns Orlando’s reason to him, and they all live happily ever after.
With so much high emotion one might have wished for more demonstrative acting from the cast, but forsooth there was not! Instead, what we got was a lot of polite posturing, stand and sing, and stares that were double charged with spiteful meaning. But hey, its opera and our disbelief is meant to be suspended!
But, the singing! Oh the singing was divine!
After a tightly controlled start, in which Matthews in particular seemed to be coming to grips with the acoustic of the immense Town Hall auditorium that can be unkind to some vocalists, the piece hit its straps with Kleeman’s first aria Now We Ride Bravely by Handel. Kleeman, who is barely twenty-five years old, has a booming lyrical bass baritone voice that easily fills the auditorium with lush tones that are equally strong at both ends of his register. Top stuff! He can moon walk as well, and has an actor’s flair. Matthews was especially impressive in many difficult recitatives and made it patently obvious why she is one of Australia’s best singers. As the Guardian of the Moon she loomed larger than life. Russell sang Astolfo beautifully, demonstrating bel cato accomplishment.
The setting was minimalist, and it didn’t need to be anything different. Lighting was stylish and empathetic, and the costuming was lavish. The on-stage ensemble of seven was expertly led by Briggs from the harpsichord.
Voyage to the Moon is a success story and deserves to be widely seen and enjoyed.
Kym Clayton
When: 11 & 12 Mar
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Zephyr Quartet. The Space Theatre. 7 March
Surrealism and its mysteries are timeless. Because the joy of surrealism is the magic it creates from things ordinary, which is always timeless.
Zephyr Quartet’s Exquisite Corpse is a richly beautiful work, redolent of sounds and images completely within the spirit of the original game of collaboration of the same name. An artist gives to another artist the end piece of a work they’ve created. That artist uses this piece to create their bit of work, passing on the end of that creation to another artist. Repeat.
Founder of Surrealism André Breton’s words, quoted in the program concerning the game, clearly note Exquisite Corpse’s content, “could not be begotten by one mind alone, and that they were endowed, in a much greater measure, with a power of drift that poetry cannot value too highly.”
Twelve pieces of music, accompanied by a fabulously Robert Crumb style series of fantastical animations, washed over the audience in an hour seemingly too short to contain the rich depths of musical and visual inventiveness gifted to the audience.
Drift and poetry says it all. Belinda Gehlert, Emily Tulloch, Jason Thomas and Hilary Kleinig play as artists in thrall to each composer’s especial musical expression, managing deftly to give full life to each piece as the work passes from one composer to the next, no matter the great number of pieces there are.
Combined with Jo Kerlogue and Luku Kukuku’s ravishing animations, a profoundly rich and dense visual, emotional poetry of hope, decay, resurrection, darkness, perversion and enlightenment offers itself up.
The wistful grace of Zephyr Quartet’s playing belies the very great depths of darkness some of these pieces of music reach, amplified often by the animations. Yet, it is darkness imbued with a wonderfully delicately cerebral, considered and romantic expression, gently and carefully expressed in each passage of cello and violin they were written for. Hence the contrast with the brightest, quickest works is all the more apparent, magnifying, alike to a microscope, the very many layers within the work as a whole.
David O’Brien
When: 7, 8 March
Where: The Space Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival. Thebartone Theatre. 6 Mar 2016
Vampilla, support act to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, were getting in the mood as three members traipsed about the foyer of Thebarton Theatre in white modernist clothes embossed in black calligraphy, sporting a black flag with white calligraphy. An outrageously brilliant, overly long, horizontal black Elvis wig on one member was a costume highlight.
Japan’s self styled avant garde ‘brutal orchestra’ were ready to rip on their second visit to the Adelaide Festival of Arts.
Rip, roar, and tear the heart out of classical music with cartoon savvy punk style abandon they most certainly did and the audience lapped it up. Machine gun bursts of heady metal style rock, interspersed with gentle phrases of violin and piano and lung bursting hearty vocals roared through the venue.
If that wasn’t enough, playing the audience with music-box like phrases and encouraging hands in the air swaying, proved hugely successful as just one of many musical and theatrical antics employed by Vampilla to mash up the romantic bombast of opera with an anarchic spirit of rebellion.
For Vampilla, the classic, operatic style is anything they want it to be and no one’s allowed to argue the point, just get into the theatricality of it and enjoy.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor had a solid crowd eagerly awaiting them. The band hadn’t played live anywhere in the world since 2003, until they began doing so again in 2010.
The near two hour set, with accompanying split screen video projection, challenged the audience to allow the wave of sound to crash over and about them, yet pay close attention to the structure of linked visual and musical narrative. To elicit key moments, sound and vision coalesced in flashes of epiphany, encompassing a meditation of the battle to sustain nature and humanity.
Three grand phrases comprised the evening’s experience, each quite clearly and explicitly demarked.
Beginning with a soft rolling violin zither, and flickering out-of-focus projection which slowly became clearer and clearer sprang a paean of ‘hope’. Filled with soaring violin, sounding as if seeking places to rest, hurried on by growling undercurrents of percussive bass to vision of deserted towns, fields and graves. This descended into quiet, broken by solo guitar notes pulled in such a manner they sounded like heady drops of water, and indeed water was the visual theme to accompany the barrelling, grumbling roll of percussion and base guitar rising and falling in sharp cracking cantos of despair, with the equally sparse vision of rising birds amidst grey skies as flashes of buckshot flare.
This emotively discordant growl faded down, replaced by a series of sharp, deep, hard base drum beats leading into the darkest and lightest moments of the evening.
The base drum lead the phase for the early part, with rattling lead guitar and violin rustling swiftly beneath as the visual projection looked on nature in a darker, more deathly context.
Each beat, suggested death of black and white infrared deer. Each growl of ‘death’ gripping the audience until, in a subtle shift, came light leading into a thrilling pianissimo crisscrossing of violin and piano rising ever higher and higher. The sound peaking in a momentous, excited burst of light filled freedom and comprehension which placidly played on through, back to the violin zither which began the evening.
David O’Brien
When: 6 March
Where: Thebarton Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Presented by Adelaide Wind Orchestra. Concordia College Chapel, Highgate. 5 Mar 2016
A fragment from the iconic Star Wars theme is being tenderly picked out on a xylophone as Symphonic Suite by John Williams from the film Star Wars: The Force Awakens gently fades away to bring the concert to a close. But every composition before it was swashbuckling, heroic, adventurous, and … from a galaxy far, far away. The program is an action packed veritable cornucopia of some of the finest and most memorable film music since 1978 and is warmly received by a large audience that ranged in ages from seven to seventy!
The Adelaide Wind Orchestra kicks off its 2016 season with a highly entertaining program dedicated to some of the the giants of modern film music composition: Bruce Broughton (Silverado), Michael Giacchino (The Incredibles, Star Trek), Jerry Goldsmith (The Mummy, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek: Insurrection), Alan Silvestri (The Mummy Returns), and James Horner (Apollo 13, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan).
Last but by no means least the program features the music of the 86 years young John Williams, who really needs no introduction. The ultimate distinction in any form of human endeavor is to become ‘part of the furniture’ and John Williams is that: surely there is no-one alive who has not heard at least one of his compositions! The AWO plays instantly recognisable pieces from Hook, Superman, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
In typical Fringe Festival fashion, the concert has a laid back feel to it. Director and conductor Dave Polain host the evening and begin dressed in pirate attire replete with eye patch and hook hand. Several members of the ensemble also occasionally wear hats or other items of clothing that are the sartorial analogues of musical leitmotifs; Polain wears Spock ears and flashes a Superman undergarment at the appropriate times. Despite the fun, and despite Polain’s reserved and unembellished conducting style, the AWO is tight and up to its accustomed exacting standard. Musically, they are top notch. That said some of the early arrangements (such as the Superman March) need something else in the quieter sections, which the clarinets and flutes do not seem to supply, to compensate for the absence of a string section; which a wind orchestra of course lacks.
The French horns are in fine form, with impressive glissandi in Silverado. Double bass player Lucy Hatcher – the only string player in the orchestra – also displays her ample skills on bass guitar during the very catchy arrangement of the Incredibles Suite. Tom von Einem’s precise but empathetic percussion on bongo drums works beautifully with the fine work from the flute section and keyboard to give an exotic dance like feel to the Symphonic Suite based on music from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. Timothy Frahn’s solo on C trumpet in the Main Title from Apollo 13 superbly captures the loneliness and foreboding the crew of the badly damaged spacecraft must have felt as they limped back to Earth. David Lang is also conspicuous by his fine trumpet work throughout the evening.
The audience base of the Adelaide Wind Orchestra is slowly growing as the word gets out that we have a world class ensemble in our midst. I was accompanied by someone who was quite ‘unsure’ whether they would enjoy the performance or not, but left impressed. The AWO’s next performance (which are always one-offs) will be in the Flinders Street Baptist Church on 9 April and will showcase Mozart’s gorgeous Gran Partita.
AWO Plays John Williams is a sparkling start to the year.
Kym Clayton
When: 5 Mar
Where: Concordia College Chapel, Highgate
Bookings: Closed